Interview with Mr Krishan Dhawan

Our home base is in the United States and we have a large development base in India. And coincidently, Indian and US time zones are about 12 hours apart. Indian software development team, our integral part of global team is not just handling specific task but they are active partners of the team. And given the nature of development process; work that is started in the US in the morning, finishes by the evening. This work then can be handed over to the Indian team that comes in. Thus, it is sort of relay kind of work.

We at Oracle India, offer every single solution that the company offers all over the world as well. It is a complete suite of enterprise solutions that ranges from Database to Middleware to Applications.

It is the most comprehensive suite of solutions offered by any company in the world. Most of our competitors operate in one of these three spaces, or may be two, but nobody operates in all these three.

Well, we are capitalizing on it by focusing and updating a separate business. And by making available alternate provisions of products that are most suitable to small enterprises, are less complicated, easy to implement, less expensive, and are in line with the less complex needs that medium size business has.

We are nourishing this business such that initially, we were located in six major metropolitan cities. Now, we have points in presence in seventeen other cities across the country for we believe that there are too many of the medium size businesses that are already willing as well as able to grow technologically and would like quality in all their operations.

Well, as mentioned earlier, we are using the model ‘Follow the Sun’. As India is geographically positioned to develop, and this of course is the advantage added to availability of trained and skilled manpower. Further, it is the second largest location of manpower, for the company is the home base in the US. Most recently, if you add our subsidiaries and all our bases in India, it is 20,000 people now, which is most significant portion of the total head counts of the company. And almost all lines of businesses are represented here. Moreover, everybody knows that Oracle has brought, discovered India, so to speak, as a development center long before it became fashionable to do so. Thus, we started our first development center in India in 1994, and we would be slowly increasing the number as well, marking a significant presence for us today.

It is doing very well. We are being benefited from the strong level of economic activity and growth that the economy is exhibiting and has been expecting last several years. And, we hope this is expected to continue in future too. In addition, we are being benefited from within that overall growth. We believe a larger focus on IT and its recognition of how IT can help Indian companies improve productivity and competitiveness has enabled to compete in much more, both to domestic and global market as well.

Our main medium for discharging our CSR responsibilities is ‘Oracle Foundation,’ whose charter is entirely to spread the use of technical education and most of our synergies are routed through that and helps multiple program. Thus, our relationship with children starts from middle school and continues till University. So in middle school level, we have a product called ‘Think.Com’, which is basically a collaboration tool; an online collaboration tool. It does not seek to teach a child any thing specific apart from part of technology or part of collaboration or co-operation in voicing together. This is because we believe that apart from technical skill, which we often may be well equipped with, the strong element of future success is; the ability and willingness to collaborate; and to understand how collaboration can generate result that are better. Therefore, this program has been highly successful since we started. It works very well.

We are deploying it through school system network rather than going one by one, because we can teach the teachers; train the trainers; and they can further train others and so on and so forth. So, we think what we needed was largest school system in the country - The Kendriya Vidyalay School system, which has over thousand schools, and is geographically spread all over the country; has good socio economic mix in its students; and current number of students is well over 300,000, as well. It worked well, and so we are taking it to other school systems also; talking to Delhi Public School society and Navoday School too.

Then, we have ‘Oracle Academy’ targeted at class XI, XII and Polytechnic students. This is where for the first time actually, we teach students; one to one skills as well as specific database skills that they can then leverage in their both, college education and later on, in their work space. One topic spoken a lot about in the country is the so called ‘Skill Gap’. We are producing a lot of graduates but those who do not have skills relevant or in line of the market needs. So at Oracle, we work for the University authorities and this led to another program called the ‘Oracle Education,’ an initiative targeted for engineering colleges. Through these programs, we actually work with institutions to change and amend the curriculum to the one that reflects current needs of the job market. Thereafter, we donate our software in kind, for free use. We then, train the teachers again such that the students keep acquiring skills relevant to the job market today.

We are thus following this pattern with various networks of colleges and school. We are working with 100 polytechnic in Karnataka through an institution called BIT which has a record for IT education and services in Karnataka. We believe, one need not get a four or five-year engineering degree to do a lot of work in IT business, and therefore polytechnics are not to be neglected community within educational strata. We work with our Knowledge Kendras in Andhra Pradesh, within engineering schools/colleges like IITs and others in Karnataka and Andhra, in a big way.

Well, it is sort of, I think, we have lightened self interest, because Indian Engineers have an impact all over the world today. And so it is important that they enter the job markets with skill to make themselves productive employees for a bright future.

Well, its multi-dimensional question although through, and it is both by product, by industry and also by market segment. In general, India is seeing good economy growth across all sectors. Our traditional areas of strength and strong performance have been the banking sector, telecom sector, government sector and manufacturing sector as well. So, indeed we are continuing at full speed ahead.

We believe the government sector is sort of less penetrated or less used to deploy IT solutions to meet needs when compared with more developed countries where the government is amongst the biggest user of IT. So, we feel that there is lot of potential in government space. We are doing a lot, but we think there is much more to do.

And in terms of solutions, as you know, our main product which additionally has been a database product on the top of which we have been doing very well on ERP solutions side, whereas, on the applications front, in addition to normal ERP we are finding a lot of interaction for which tradition is to focus on people management. So, increasing the focus is now on Customer Relations Management and Human Resources Management or Human Capital Management. Thus, we are seeing a good uptake of activity there, and also witnessing companies collecting and storing data to use it more constructively though in the area of business intelligence. We are seeing much more activities in Enterprise Performance Management, basically, again using this information more proactively to manage information.

Sectorally, any big company is continued to be one of the important domain for us. But, we are also very optimistic about the growth that medium size segment represents. And, we think the level of uptake, and the level of growth in this segment is going to be strong and we are focusing on that segment as well.

We started offering Customer Relationship Management on Demand (CRM-On Demand), which is a subscriber service. To start with, we offered it to Indian Businesses ideally suited for medium size – typically small or medium business that are not willing or able to invest in a typical deployment. It is just the beginning, and we are exploring other model where small medium companies are able to use the software as on Demand Service rather than their traditional model where actually they buy, install and use it on their own. So, this typical trend is definitely coming. It is question of timing you know, and in theory, it makes a lot of sense as it is a question of getting customer acceptance that we are looking forward to.